Backlog Beatdown: Pegging Pegs with Peggle

The summer holidays were approaching but I still had a week of work to go before I could chill out and ‘relax’ with an 80+ hour RPG. What I needed was another pick-up-and-play game that I could beat. I’ve got Candy Crush Saga on my phone but that’s definitely going in to the long term. And I wanted to give a system that wasn’t the Playstation a go. Enter Peggle on my Xbox 360…

Peggle was released for free a few months ago on Xbox Live Arcade, and I downloaded it straight away knowing that I’d want a light game to play in the future. How very right I was, as I became addicted almost straight away and played the game more or less all the way through in one day. I needed a little more time than that to beat the last few levels but once I’d got there it was a nice sense of accomplishment. I even had a go on the multiplayer mode, beating someone in a duel though I struggle with the party mode (where four of you have to make the best shot on the same map.) It is what it is – light hearted fun. And that’s where I’m enjoying games the most these days.

This level was a pain in the bum. Those bricks at the bottom?
They're moving to give the illusion of a 'road.' Ha ha.

The premise of the game is astonishingly simple: You have a grid of pegs and 10 balls to fire at it from the top. The idea is to clear all the orange pegs or blocks – usually 25 in a level – to beat the level. After that it’s a score attack – you’re looking to get the best possible score by clearing as many pegs as possible. Other than the walls in the play area, everything you hit will give you points to one degree or another, and if you can get the purple peg, that will give you a bonus to your score. Also there’s a bucket running across the bottom of the screen; if your ball ends up in that you get a free ball.

Diversity in the game comes in the form of the ‘Peggle Masters;’ anthropomorphic creatures who have their own ways of breaking the rules of the game. One master, Bjorn Unicorn, shows you the angle at which your ball will bounce, whereas Claude the crab creates a set of pinball-style flippers with which you can control the ball. My favourite is Cat Tut, as his bonus is to create a ‘pyramid’ on the bucket at the bottom that can potentially catch the ball from a much wider angle, bouncing it back in to play or giving you an extra ball. Or some more points. Either is good with me.

I won’t pretend that some of the scores I racked up weren’t more by luck than judgement, but it’s always a nice feeling when you work out an impossible shot, or gain three free balls in one shot. It is what it is – a nice little game that is a lot of fun to play, has about the right amount of skill involved and doesn’t necessarily rely on guns and headshots.

I’ve had a lot of fun with Peggle. This is the kind of game that lost out on 6^th generation consoles (PS2, Xbox etc.) By then, everyone had mobile phones and this is the sort of game you would play on those devices. If one was released for console it would almost certainly be bypassed for another action game, or given the time period, extreme sports. It’s nice to see them make a comeback, of sorts, on tablets and phones, but it’s good to see them on XBLA as well as they really are great games when they’re handled well and are a lot of fun to play. There’s a whole load of achievements I’d suck all the fun out of the game by trying to collect, including some DLC that I may or may not buy in the future. For now, having got to the end of the adventure mode, I will happily say that I’ve beaten this game – the rest of the content is there if I need to kill five minutes at some point. There aren’t enough games like this around these days!